Latin America
Latin America is the most urbanised region in the world after North America —more than 80% of its population lives in cities— and the one that urbanised fastest in the twentieth century: from rural-urban migration to the ten-million metropolis in two generations. Its city combines the colonial grid, the informal periphery and the highest income segregation on the planet.
It is also a policy laboratory: bus rapid transit in Curitiba and Bogotá, social urbanism in Medellín, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, incremental housing by Elemental in Chile. Fernando Carrión, Raúl Zibechi, Alfredo Rodríguez and Raquel Rolnik think the region from within.
Videos on this term (84)
- Surveillance / data
Urbanized Fear: Security, Segregation and Resistance in the City
Teresa Caldeira explains how fear designs the city: the talk of crime, fortified enclaves in São Paulo, the paradox…
3 min read - Urban economy
Castells: From Collective Consumption to the Space of Flows
Manuel Castells's urban thought moved from collective consumption and urban social movements to the network society…
Manuel Castells 3 min read - Housing
Mike Davis: Risk Is Not Natural but a Construct of Power
Mike Davis argued that urban disasters are built before the emergency through segregation, speculation and unequal…
Mike Davis 3 min read - Urban form
Néstor García Canclini: Where Cultures Mix, Belonging Emerges
Néstor García Canclini explains Latin American urban culture as hybridity: Hybrid Cultures, consumption as…
3 min read - Shrinking cities
Who Deserves Space in the City? Peñalosa and the Fair Street
Enrique Peñalosa turned the distribution of urban space into a policy of equality: pavements, cycle paths,…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Why Cities Are the Key Nodes of Globalization: Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen explains why a dispersed economy needs global cities to coordinate it: command functions, social…
Saskia Sassen 3 min read - Urban ecology
Water, a Resource Not Everyone Can Enjoy Equally
Who runs out of water first is decided by leaks, planning and distribution, not the climate. Cape Town's Day Zero.…
3 min read - Urban economy
Who Benefits from Luxury Built with Public Funds?
How a luxury district is manufactured in four steps, rezoning, public investment, brand and phased sales, and who…
3 min read - Public space
Security Through Walls: Protection or Segregation?
Gated communities privatise surveillance and empty the street. What Caldeira, Low and Sabatini show about fortified…
3 min read - Climate change
Shade in Extreme Heat: A Divisive Privilege and an Urban Right
Shade is survival infrastructure distributed unequally: redlined neighbourhoods are hotter, awnings are cut as…
3 min read - Climate change
Resilience Is Just a Mask for Resignation
How resilience went from physics and ecology to an urban agenda that asks communities to absorb risks they did not…
3 min read - Infrastructure
The 15-Minute City Conspiracy: How Proximity Became a Lockdown
How Carlos Moreno's 15-minute city, a century-old proximity idea, became a conspiracy theory after Oxford's 2023…
3 min read - Urban economy
Neoliberalism from Below: Verónica Gago's Popular Economies
Verónica Gago's neoliberalism from below explains how popular economies, such as La Salada in Buenos Aires,…
2 min read - Public space
Raúl Zibechi: Urban Social Movements and Territories in Resistance
Raúl Zibechi argues that Latin America's urban movements build non-state powers in their neighbourhoods. His ideas…
Raúl Zibechi 3 min read - Public space
Insurgent Citizenship: James Holston and the Peripheries of São Paulo
James Holston's insurgent citizenship explains how the residents who self-built São Paulo's peripheries won rights…
James Holston 3 min read - Climate change
David Simon and Resilient Cities in the Global South
David Simon studies how Global South cities adapt to climate change with informality and few resources.
David Simon 3 min read - Public space
Latin American Urban Theory: Marcelo Lopes de Souza
Latin American urban theory reads the city through inequality, informality and social struggle.
2 min read - Climate change
Urban Resilience: How Cities Recover After Disaster
The Resilient City (2005) by Vale and Campanella explains how Chicago, Warsaw, Hiroshima or New York rebuilt after…
3 min read - Climate change
Vale and Campanella: Who Returns to the City After Disaster
The Resilient City by Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella shows that cities almost always rebuild, but resilience…
Lawrence Vale 3 min read - Housing
Di Virgilio: social housing and participatory urbanism
María Mercedes Di Virgilio on habitat, housing and the city in Latin America: precarious housing, social housing…
2 min read - Urban ecology
Ian McHarg: Design with Nature
A summary of Ian McHarg's Design with Nature (1969): planning from the territory up, layered maps, and the origin…
2 min read - Urban form
Jaime Lerner: the urban acupuncture of Curitiba
Lerner argues that one small, well-placed intervention transforms a whole neighbourhood. He proved it as mayor of…
Jaime Lerner 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Mike Davis: Planet of Slums, Inequality and Megacities
Mike Davis explains in Planet of Slums how the megacities of the Global South grow without jobs or infrastructure,…
Mike Davis 2 min read - Climate change
Urban Resilience and Climate Change: Governing Climate with Justice
Urban resilience to climate change is a way of governing, not a technical attribute. What Pauline McGuirk's…
2 min read - Urban ecology
Karen Bakker: Why Water Privatisation Failed in Cities
Karen Bakker showed that water is an uncooperative commodity and that neither privatisation nor bureaucracy solves…
Karen Bakker 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
James Scott: Why the State's Grand Plans Fail
James C. Scott explains in Seeing Like a State why high modernist plans fail: legibility, Le Corbusier, Brasília…
James Scott 2 min read - Housing
The Right to Housing According to Raquel Rolnik
The right to housing is in treaties and constitutions, but policies hollow it out. What Raquel Rolnik defended as…
Raquel Rolnik 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Urban Geography in the 21st Century: Challenges and New Frontiers
How urban geography has changed: theory beyond the Global North, cities and climate change, technologies of…
2 min read - Urban history
A City on a Lake by Matthew Vitz: Mexico City and Its Lake
A City on a Lake by Matthew Vitz explains how Mexico City grew on the drained Lake Texcoco and how water, forests…
Matthew Vitz 3 min read - Urban economy
Land Policy: Power, Value Capture and Spatial Justice
Land policy decides who gains from urban growth. What it is, how Edward Soja links it to spatial justice and which…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Teresa Caldeira and São Paulo: Growth, Inequality and Equity
Teresa Caldeira explains how São Paulo grew through self-built peripheries and split into fortified enclaves.
Teresa Caldeira 3 min read - Shrinking cities
Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff
Charlie LeDuff narrates in Detroit: An American Autopsy the collapse of the Motor City: relocation, white flight,…
3 min read - Urban psychology
Diane Davis: Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence
Diane Davis explains how communities resist and adapt to chronic violence and which governance reduces it:…
Diane Davis 3 min read - Public space
Ana Falú: Feminist Urbanism and Inclusion in Cities
Ana Falú, a reference of feminist urbanism in Latin America: urban safety from a gender perspective, women's…
Ana Falú 2 min read - Mobility
Enrique Peñalosa and the Transformation of Bogotá (1998-2000)
Enrique Peñalosa transformed Bogotá between 1998 and 2000 with TransMilenio, cycle paths, pavements and libraries…
3 min read - Housing
Alfredo Rodríguez: Santiago, Social Housing and Los con Techo
Alfredo Rodríguez documented how Chilean housing policy produced ghettos on Santiago's periphery.
Alfredo Rodríguez 3 min read
